Category Archives: Writing

Congrats to those of you finishing Nanowrimo today!

For a while now I’ve been tracking my writing time (and writing a program to analyze it, the results of which I’ll discuss I ever finish it (this is a programming exercise as much as a way to get the results)). Recently I recorded everything I did for about a week and a half–which was incredibly tedious–to see where I can squeeze more writing into the day.

The results were rather depressing. There really weren’t any big chunks of wasted time to get rid of. Alas! While it’s nice to know I haven’t been wasting my life, that means I have to get creative if I want to cram more time into my week. (I’m pretty good about using the time that I have, but I’d like to find more of it, without cutting out anything important. Good luck, right?)

I did learn random nifty things: it was taking me twice as long to get out of bed and down to the basement to work out as it did to get out of bed and leave for the pool. That was easy to fix by getting my workout clothes ready the night before no matter what kind of workout it is. Also, it takes me far too long to shower, dress, and prep breakfast and lunch in the morning, so this week I’m trying out something I’ve been planning for awhile: doing a week’s worth on Sunday. It was a tight squeeze to put 5 containers of muesli, yogurt, and berries in the fridge with all the Thanksgiving leftovers, but nice to know I don’t have to think about it for the whole week. (I didn’t even try to fit the scrambled eggs in the fridge this week, though).

I also applied the data to a new writing schedule. The old one had fallen by the wayside, but I’ve been sticking to a pretty good mental schedule, so I wrote that one up on my calendar to give myself the satisfaction of marking sessions off. (Yes, I am one of those people who will put things I’ve already done on my to do list just so I can cross them off.)

The final piece of my time tracking investigation is to not worry about it nearly as much as this entry makes it sound like I am. Really. I just like having a schedule.

So I wrote this book. It’s an urban fantasy. Most of what I like to write and read is secondary-world fantasy (I’m not going to split hairs between epic, heroic, and sword and sorcery). I had fun writing it–got to use a lot of stuff from my time at the newspaper–but.

I keep thinking that if I sold it, the publisher would want more urban fantasy. And it’s not what I want to be writing, though I do have several other ideas to explore in that genre.

So I think I might chalk it up as a fun first draft and not bother revising it.

(Of course, this decision might be influenced by the fact that I’ve been revising a novel for a while and have a new novel that I really really really want to start writing because it will be awesome. It even has a title! Usually my stuff doesn’t have a title until I submit it.)

Good luck to those of you writing madly this year.

Once again I won’t be joining you. Although I had fun the two years I did it, and would enjoy doing it again, there’s a reason I’ve never done anything with the two books I wrote. It was too fast for me to write a first draft when I didn’t have a plan, because my brain had to spend all its time coming up with words instead of thinking ideas through.

The experience did help me decide that I really should learn to plan books in advance, which is working out beautifully–but I don’t have one ready to go right now. Maybe next year, if I get a couple drafts of a new book and some old books done first. Meanwhile, I’ll be continuing work on this handful of short stories.

I am not into conlangs. I find the idea interesting, but not enough to spend time on it. However, most of the stories I write are set in other worlds, where it’s useful to have a few words of a language the people there might speak, or at the very least, a way to come up with consistent-sounding names for characters.

So I made this random word generator for fictional languages. If you download the free Player, you can…play with it.

It uses a very simple method to generate words. I told it what consonants and vowels it was allowed to use, and what patterns of consonants and vowels were allowed. Then it randomly generates a bunch of words.

A high percentage of the results aren’t usable, either because they aren’t easy to pronounce or spell, or because they just don’t sound right. But it’s so fast to generate more that I haven’t gone back to create more specific rules.

How do you make up your fantasy names?

Over the weekend we had a (very) brief discussion of passive voice vs passive language.

Passive voice is an actual grammar thing, whereas passive language has more to do with style. I didn’t find much about it in my googling, so everything here is just my opinion about some of the things I think makes prose passive.

Passive voice can cause passive language, but sometimes it’s useful: “He was shot!” lets you state the fact without blaming the death on anyone in particular. “Someone shot him!” sounds vague, and what if it wasn’t someone, but something?

Passive language has a lot to do with verbs. For a long time my favorite sentence structure was something like “The body was lying on the ground. The officers were examining the scene.” Ok, I didn’t use it in every sentence, but it was too much and got boring.

Another example of passive language would be the simple structure “The body was on the ground.” Nothing wrong with that either, but string too many together: “It was cold. The concrete was bloody, and the blood had congealed. The officers were bored.” I’m bored too.

I might even claim that passive language includes boring descriptions. “She was angry. She felt cold. She saw the body. She tasted the blood. The officers were disgusted.” Disgusted by poor verb choice!

(It’s not just the verbs, but also the plain and repetitive basic sentence structure. But mostly I blame the verbs.)

None of these are passive voice. They’re just…blah. Active prose needs more interesting verbs.

Back in March, I mentioned that I’d been doing weekly writing exercises. Well, like most things that I don’t actually schedule a time slot for, I started procrastinating and then lost the habit.

But a couple weeks ago I decided to write x number of new words a day, whether or not I have a project to put them in (I believe I said last week that I spend a lot of time revising). To do that, I need things to write, so I’m back to exercises, which double as thinking about plot and character for future projects.

Right now I’m working through exercises from Ann Hood’s Creating Character Emotions. I described this book in Vision a few years ago, but never posted much about it here. It has 36 chapters, each covering one feeling, with examples of how not to portray it and some better examples from a variety of other writers. Each chapter also has three exercises. I’ve poked at them before, picking the book up once or twice a year, doing a few, and then forgetting about it. This time I’m curious to see how many I can get through before I start writing my next book.

I used to detest revising books. Now that I’ve had more practice at it, I still dislike it. It just drags on and on and on…

So I was thinking about ways to make the process more efficient so it doesn’t take so long.

* Plan the book before writing it – I switched from pantsing to plotting a couple books ago, and it made a huge difference.

* None of that “I’ll figure that out later” during the planning process. Now that I have a better idea how to plan, I should be able to figure everything out instead of leaving myself plot holes. I’m sure I’ll still leave myself plot holes, but next time I’m not going to let myself do so knowingly.

* Ditto for the first draft.

* Big chunks of time. If I’m trying to hold big pieces of the story in my head, it helps to work on it for a longer time. Unfortunately, while I’ve gotten really good at wedging writing into small blocks of time, I’m not good at finding big blocks. One would think weekends would be useful here.

* Working at home where my notes are. Because I don’t have a portable device that runs Scrivener, most revision happens at home, where I’m also most easily distractable.

* Less on paper, but more on screen (less re-typing), but see the previous point for the downside.

* Still undecided on everything at once vs one thing at a time, though I don’t think my brain will let me do anything else until the plot’s fixed.

Anyone have some good tips for revising a book faster?

(We can take “put more hours in” as not answering the question I’m asking, and “get more practice” as too obvious to state.)

First, a reminder for the local folks: My Toastmasters club (Toast of Champaign) is having a Guest Day tomorrow. We meet at noon in room C of the Champaign Public Library. There will be light refreshments.

Anyway, I’m working on a talk about book clubs. From my perspective as a writer, there are a few different benefits–mostly the same as for me as a reader, with maybe one addition.

* Deadlines! It sounds silly, because I like to read and I read every day, but deadlines help me focus on reading and get a particular book read. Otherwise I tend to be distracted by the next shiny book and forget about or put off books that I meant to read. The library effect contributes to this–I only request books if I really want them right away for a reason, so most of the time if I want to read a popular book, I just wait until it appears on the shelf.

* Expanded horizons. I usually stick with fantasy and some SF, but I like to dip outside the genre every now and then. When I went to the library’s book club, we read mainstream books, a few classics, some memoirs–things I would have never thought to pick up otherwise.

* Reader reactions. This is the one that’s different for writer-me. I’ve spent so much time around writers that I’ve forgotten how readers react to books. Or how I used to react. The library book club was interesting because the observations people made were different. I paid a lot more attention to craft than the other members. Plus, I used to not think about the author. Now there’s less “why did the character do x” than “why did the author choose to have the character do x”. (But I still don’t sit there thinking, “how do x, y, and z support the theme” like in high school English class. Gah.)

Lately I’ve been exploring two book clubs on Goodreads, both for fantasy. I’m looking for a nonfiction one, but those seem a lot less common.

Any book club fans among you?

It seems like if the magic is widespread (everybody has it, or could have it if they wanted to learn), it doesn’t need to have a large cost, or any cost–cost exists partly as an equalizer and if everyone’s paying the same amount, they might as well be paying nothing.

On the other hand, I’ve heard people complain that the widespread magic in Harry Potter has no cost. On the other other hand, if I were to poke at the worldbuilding there, that wouldn’t be where I would start, so I could discount those opinions as “different priorities/tastes”. (Back to the second hand, the complaint that it has no limits is more valid, but still doesn’t bother me.)

***

Internal versus external. In fantasy the expectation is that the cost is internal. You can’t throw any more fireballs today because it will drive you insane, corrupt you, kill you, or kill someone you love.

In SF, you don’t hear “Yes, Captain, I could give you ten more minutes at warp 9.8, but I’m down seven fingers already and I don’t want to lose my thumbs, too.” The cost of technology is external–money, or time, or effort. It can kill you, but not as a normal part of the routine.

***

Which should mean that if magic is treated as a science in your world, it doesn’t need an internal cost. To the people in that world, it’s not magic, it’s another branch of science.

(Does not apply to magic acquired as a gift from the gods, demon summoning, etc.)

***

Low- or no-cost magic is not the same thing as magic with no limits or no rules. Just because throwing another fireball won’t make your leg fall off doesn’t mean you have enough ACME Fireball Starter to do it (you have to buy more, so there’s your external cost), or have studied enough to pass the exam so that you have permission to learn the spell, or that fireballs are even possible under the laws of your universe.

***

This post was inspired by my thoughts on (part of) David B. Coe’s Thoughts on creating magic systems from a while back, where he says he tries to make sure his magic has internal consistency, limits, and cost. I agree on the first two. (And without internal consistency, you couldn’t treat magic as a science.)

In the comments on last week’s post, Erin mentioned podcasts as a way of learning things while doing something else.

I subscribe to a bunch of podcasts, though I don’t do a good job of keeping up with them. I listen in the mornings when I’m lifting weights/doing yoga, and on weekends when I put laundry away or (sometimes) while doing yardwork or cleaning.

Most of them aren’t nonfiction, though. There’s the Stuff You Missed in History Class podcast, which is the most applicable to writing research, and to generating ideas. I used to subscribe to two podcasts from our local public radio station, but I never listened to them because they’re an hour long, and they weren’t really well edited (they included everything on the radio, like the weather, not just an interview or story on one subject).

Most of my podcasts are about writing. The current lineup includes:

• Adventures in SciFi Publishing – About the genre in general, not just writing. These are an hour long, so they get saved up for long drives or yardwork sessions.
• I Should Be Writing – Shockingly this is about writing. Probably the one I’ve been listening to the longest. She split the feedback section off into its own episodes, which tend to be shorter, so I listen to those while exercising and the longer ones while doing house/yardwork.
• Speculate – I just learned about this one, so it hasn’t found a home in my schedule yet. Like the first two podcasts on this list, there seems to be a big emphasis on interviews.
• StoryWonk Daily – Emphasis on writing. Pretty short, and seems to not have interviews, which actually makes me more likely to listen on a regular basis (because interviews are so hit or miss). This one’s a pretty recent discovery on my part but I can see it becoming a regular part of my listening.
• Writing Excuses – This is the first podcast I always turn to (unless I’m on a long drive, because they’re short). But it’s only once a week, so I need the others to keep me occupied.

On the one hand I don’t have time to keep up with all of those. (And one I listen to for work, and Podcastle, and the random things I’ve downloaded from iTunes U.) On the other hand…what podcasts do you listen to? I’m always happy to try new ones.